I was doing some research on the term "international communication" for a colleague, and was surprised by the results. The number one site was a single page that had a lot of outbound links, and moderate keyword density, but had 0 inbound links when I checked it in Google. The 2nd highest site was a fairly popular site from the looks of it, and had almost 400 inbound links. Any idea why a site with no inbound links would be ranked higher than a site with hundreds of inbound links for the same term? (Assuming this was the day to day trend and not just a glitch)
Well google doesnt show all the links so it probably has some. Im guessing its little bit of links are a ton better than the other site. Check backlinks on Yahoo, not google. Doesnt matter the other site has 400 if they are all shitty. Also domain age probably plays a big role. Compare how old the sites are.
Don't try to depend on Google to show you inbound links to other site's URLs. The LINK: operator typically shows only a small sample (if that) of inbound links. There are pages in Google's Webmaster Tools where you can also see inbound links to your URLs but again... it's only a sample... usually a larger sample than the LINK: operator would show you, but a sample none the less. I prefer to use Yahoo! Site Explorer. You use the LINK operator similar to the way you did at Google and choose "Except from this domain" from the dropdown. This will show all external links to the URL that YAHOO! knows about. Yes it will give you a slightly different list than those that Google knows about but the Yahoo! list IS exhaustive from a Yahoo! perspective (i.e. It is ALL links that Yahoo! knows about... NOT just a sample like Googles). So it will give you a very good idea of what Google is seeing as well. My guess is that generally 80+% of those Yahoo! links typically are also known to Google.
Although, you must have seen that the second site have much more links than the first website, there are more than thousands factors in Google Alogarithms which manage what works and what does not work for Top SERPs. Try to analyse the website in much more depth, as who is linking to them, how much old is domain, domain url, etc.
PR is a lagging number that is updated infrequently. Perhaps upon the next PR update the site will not have that same PR. Also you will typically see more of the backlinks using Yahoo or MSN to run the query.
This is really good info..thanks for the post and for all the great replies!! Had no idea how this would work.
It won't be possible that you'll have high PR without any backlinks because for what i know, the more backlinks you have, the higher your PR will be.
I have a blogger blog with about 6 posts that has a PR of 5. It used to have 100+ posts but they've since been transferred to other blogs. For some reason, the PR's stuck to it.
it happens... if your traffic is consistent that good ... that mean pr is working for you... other wise youll loose it eventually ..... back links pr it is a toss up i hear the higher the pr the better ... althought pr has nothing to do with back links sorry.....